After serving for a couple of years in the French army, Crichton journeyed into Italy, and in the month of August, 1580, arrived in Venice. He made the acquaintance of the famous printer, Aldus Manutius, who introduced him to the principal men of learning and note in that city. Here he maintained the reputation he had acquired in Paris, and lives of him were written and published. From Venice he proceeded to Padua, and from thence to the Court of Mantua, where the adventure occurred with which Sir Thomas Urquhart begins the narrative of his celebrated fellow-countryman's exploits, namely, the defeat and death of the travelling bravo, whose challenge he had accepted. Sir Thomas is the only authority for this incident in Crichton's history. As there is no reason to believe that he invented it, we are at liberty to suppose that he found it in some one of the lives of Crichton which he met with in his Italian travels, but which has not come down to us, or that he heard of it from some of those who witnessed it. For, as Urquhart was born only twenty-three years after Crichton's death, he must, in the course of his continental travels, have met some who were his contemporaries.[211]
In consequence of this achievement, and also of the brilliant reputation acquired by Crichton, he was appointed by the Duke of Mantua, companion and tutor to his son, Vincenzio de Gonzaga, a young man of some literary culture, but of furious temper and dissolute morals. Very soon after, Crichton met his death in a tragical manner. He was walking home one evening in the streets of Mantua, from a visit to his mistress, and was playing a guitar, when suddenly he was attacked by a riotous party of men in masks, whom, however, he speedily put to flight. He seized the leader of the party, overpowered him, and tore off his mask, and found to his horror that it was his own pupil, the son of the Duke of Mantua. He instantly dropped upon one knee, and, in a spirit of romantic devotion, took his sword by the blade, and presented its hilt to the prince. Vincenzio, heated with wine, irritated at his discomfiture, and also, it is said by some, inspired by jealousy, took the sword and plunged it into Crichton's heart. The brilliant young Scotsman was but twenty-two years of age when he thus met his fate.
The narrative which Sir Thomas Urquhart gives of the death of his hero is marked by the same richness of description as is to be found in the account of his exploits as a scholar, a swordsman, and an actor. In language of astonishing luxuriance and frequent happiness of phrase, he enlarges upon the incidents of the last evening of Crichton's life, and depicts the tender intercourse of the lovers before the sudden and bloodly close of their courtship. With a minuteness which, as Tytler remarks, reminds one of the multitude of particulars by the enumeration of which Mrs Quickly sought to bring to Falstaff's remembrance his promise to marry her,[212] Sir Thomas Urquhart depicts the lovers in the "alcoranal paradise" in which they were embowered on that evening. "Nothing," he says, "tending to the pleasure of all the senses was wanting; the weather being a little chil and coldish, they on a blue velvet couch sate by one another towards a char-coale fire burning in a silver brasero, whilst in the next room adjacent thereto a pretty little round table of cedar wood was a covering for the supping of them two together; the cates prepared for them, and a week before that time bespoke, were of the choisest dainties and most delicious junkets that all the territories of Italy were able to afford, and that deservedly, for all the Romane Empire could not produce a completer paire to taste them."[213]
A tragical note rings through the description of the lamentation of the hapless girl over her murdered lover. "She, rending her garments and tearing her haire, like one of the Graces possest with a Fury, spoke thus: 'O villains! what have you done? you vipers of men, that have thus basely slaine the valiant Crichtoun, the sword of his own sexe and the buckler of ours, the glory of this age, and restorer of the lost honour of the Court of Mantua: O Crichtoun, Crichtoun!'"[214]
The sequel of the story is in the same vein of florid eloquence. "The whole court," says Sir Thomas, "wore mourning for him full three quarters of a yeer together. His funeral was very stately, and on his hearse were stuck more epitaphs, elegies, threnodies, and epicediums, then [than], if digested into one book, would have outbulk't all Homer's works; some of them being couched in such exquisite and fine Latin, that you would have thought great Virgil, and Baptista Mantuanus, for the love of their mother-city, had quit the Elysian fields to grace his obsequies; and other of them, besides what was done in other languages, composed in so neat Italian, and so purely fancied, as if Ariosto, Dante, Petrark, and Bembo had been purposely resuscitated, to stretch even to the utmost their poetick vein to the honour of this brave man; whose picture till this hour is to be seen in the bed-chambers or galleries of the most of the great men of that nation, representing him on horseback, with a lance in one hand and a book in the other; and most of the young ladies likewise, that were anything handsome,[215] in a memorial of his worth, had his effigies in a little oval tablet of gold hanging 'twixt their breasts, and held, for many yeers together, that metamazion, or intermammilary ornament, an as necessary outward pendicle for the better setting forth of their accoutrements, as either fan, watch, or stomacher. My lord Duke, upon the young lady that was Crichtoun's mistres and future wife, although she had good rents and revenues of her own by inheritance, was pleased to conferr a pension of five hundred ducats a yeer. The Prince also bestowed as much on her during all the days of his life, which was but short, for he did not long enjoy himself after the cross fate of so miserable an accident. The sweet lady, like a turtle bewailing the loss of her mate, spent all the rest of her time in a continual solitariness."[216]
After giving a long list of his fellow-countrymen who had won fame in foreign lands by their valour, learning, or skill, in order to put to silence those who maligned his nation, Sir Thomas Urquhart takes up a less pleasing topic—that of contemporary politics. In the plainest and most forcible manner he repudiates the whole policy of the dominant party in Scotland, and declares that a true Royalist or Malignant like himself had much more in common with an Independent, than either of them had with a Presbyterian; and he enlarges upon the turbulent disloyalty with which so many of the last-named party had, in his opinion, conducted themselves towards their sovereigns since Queen Mary's time, evidently in forgetfulness for the moment that his newly-found friends, the Independents, had executed Charles I. and abolished monarchy.
His account of the mode in which the Presbyterian or "Consistorian" party were in the habit of treating their kings is very amusing. "Of a king," he says, "they onely make use for their own ends, and so they will of any other supreme magistracie that is not of their own erection. Their kings are but as the kings of Lacedemon, whom the Ephors presumed to fine for any small offence; or as the puppy [puppet] kings, which, after children have trimmed with bits of taffata, and ends of silver lace, and set them upon wainscoat cupboards besides marmalade and sugar-cakes, are often times disposed of, even by those that did pretend so much respect unto them, for a two-peny custard, a pound of figs, or mess of cream. Verily, I think they make use of kings in their Consistorian State, as we do of card kings in playing at the hundred; any one whereof, if there be appearance of a better game without him, and that the exchange of him for another incoming card is like to conduce more for drawing of the stake, is by good gamesters without any ceremony discarded: or as the French on the Epiphany-day use their Roy de la Febre, or king of the bean; whom, after they have honoured with drinking of his health, and shouting Le Roy boit, le Roy boit, they make pay for all the reckoning; not leaving him sometimes one peny, rather then [than] that the exorbitancie of their debosh should not be satisfied to the full. They may be likewise said to use their king as the players at nine-pins do the middle kyle, which they call the king; at whose fall alone they aim, the sooner to obtain the gaining of their prize; or as about Christmas we do the King of Misrule, whom we invest with that title to no other end but to countenance the bacchanalian riots and preposterous disorders of the family where he is installed. The truth of all this appears by their demeanour to Charles the Second, whom they crowned their king at Sterlin, and who, though he be for comeliness of person, valour, affability, mercy, piety, closeness of counsel, veracity, foresight, knowledge, and other vertues both moral and intellectual, in nothing inferior to any of his hundred and ten predecessors, had nevertheless no more rule in effect over the Presbyterian Senate of Scotland, then [than] any of the six foresaid mock-kings had above those by whom they were dignified with the splendour of royal pomp."[217]
The passage in The Jewel which tells of the faults of the clergy, as illustrated by the conduct of the ministers of the parishes of which Sir Thomas was patron, has already been given in these pages, and therefore need not be repeated here; but room must be found for the paragraph in which he denounces those who by their covetousness had cast a slur upon the Scottish name. The art of writing such English perished with him, its inventor; and one cannot be too thankful for such a passage as the following. "Another thing there is," he says, "that fixeth a grievous scandal upon that nation in matter of philargyrie, or love of money, and it is this: There hath been in London, and repairing to it, for these many years together, a knot of Scotish bankers, collybists, or coine-coursers, of traffickers in merchandise to and againe, and of men of other professions, who by hook and crook, fas et nefas, slight and might, (all being as fish their net could catch), having feathered their nests to some purpose, look so idolatrously upon their Dagon of wealth, and so closely, (like the earth's dull center), hug all unto themselves, that for no respect of vertue, honour, kinred, patriotism, or whatever else, (be it never so recommendable), will they depart from so much as one single peny, whose emission doth not, without any hazard of loss, in a very short time superlucrate beyond all conscience an additionall increase to the heap of that stock which they so much adore; which churlish and tenacious humor hath made many that were not acquainted with any else of that country, to imagine all their compatriots infected with the same leprosie of a wretched peevishness, whereof those quomodocunquizing clusterfists and rapacious varlets have given of late such cannibal-like proofs, by their inhumanity and obdurate carriage towards some, (whose shoe-strings they are not worthy to unty), that were it not that a more able pen then [than] mine will assuredly not faile to jerk them on all sides, in case, by their better demeanour for the future, they endeavour not to wipe off the blot wherewith their native country, by their sordid avarice and miserable baseness, hath been so foully stained, I would at this very instant blaze them out in their names and surnames, notwithstanding the vizard of Presbyterian zeal wherewith they maske themselves, that like so many wolves, foxes, or Athenian Timons, they might in all times coming be debarred the benefit of any honest conversation."[218]
After suggesting a number of ways in which the tone of society in Scotland might be raised and sweetened—one of which is the establishment of "a free schoole and standing library in every parish"[219]—Sir Thomas proceeds to argue in a very sensible and convincing manner for complete union between Scotland and England. The subject is introduced by lengthy quotations from speeches by Bacon, delivered by him in Parliament as far back as the year 1608, in which the advantages of such an arrangement are set forth.